


until the gravity's too much

by skyparents



Series: this slope is treacherous, this daydream [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Ocean's 8 (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, And also lots of sad hours, Angst and Romance, Coming of Age, Debbie and Tammy are in love, F/F, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Lots of soft hours in here, Maybe they're together now but their problems are far from over, Most of the Harry Potter characters are very minor, Post-Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but let's not talk about that
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-11-01 04:30:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20808923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyparents/pseuds/skyparents
Summary: it scares her a little, though. or a lot. the ease with which she and tammy fall in around each other, soft and domestic and simple. the speed with which it makes all of her problems begin to fall away, and the way that makes her feel like a large part of her happiness depends on being close to her, this girl with her smooth golden curls and dark eyes that see everything and sparkle when she smiles. she doesn’t say it, though. debbie ocean is nothing if not an expert at pretending her feelings do not exist.or, the sequel tothrough the sleepless nightthat nobody asked for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it's official, though my document for this is _far_ from done and i have no idea if it will be a full-length thing or shorter than ttsn! seventh year, here we come.
> 
> this fic is a sequel to _through the sleepless night,_ so if you haven't read that, you'll probably be able to manage, but i would recommend reading it first because this is _definitely_ a continuation! i've had a sequel loosely planned out since about... chapter 4 or 5 of the original story, because i have no self-control. i've got lots of other debtam things planned out in my head, but i'm not done with this au just yet. i hope you all enjoy this!
> 
> general tidbits of information for you: you can keep up with me on twitter (@deboceans). thanks for reading, and please leave kudos or comments if you've got them! i live off your feedback, honestly. i hope i'll see you all next chapter, when a dramatic article drops in the daily prophet, and a hp character who we _didn't_ see in ttsn makes a cameo!

“She seems nice,” her mother comments, light and airy and  _ just _ as casual as she possibly can, when they are safely in the car and pulling away from King’s Cross Station. Windows down, radio humming in the background. It has been summer break for approximately twenty minutes, officially, and she likes to make it really  _ feel _ like it. “Your girlfriend, I mean. Clearly. I like her.”

Tamara Maria Prescott tries not to smile too broadly, wrinkles her nose to cover it up when she fails and smiles anyway. “You met her for, like, three minutes,” she points out. A summer breeze blows blonde hair into her face and she brushes it away, a futile effort as they merge onto the busy street.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a good intuition about people,” she says loftily, “and Debbie’s a good one. I can tell.” And Tammy can feel the blush blooming at her cheeks when she says it, and her mum glances at her sideways and tries to look as serious as she can manage. “Will you be… seeing her,” she asks, “this summer?”

She knows why the question comes; it’s not hard to pin down the reason. On Christmas Eve, when she told her mum about Debbie, it came hand-in-hand with the admission that the Gryffindor girl was decidedly not ready for broadcasting her feelings to their entire world. Things have very clearly progressed since then – Debbie herself was the one who suggested the  _ girlfriend _ title, and there’s the whole day over Easter that Tammy spent with her when Danny was in the hospital, and just now her mother shook hands with Danny  _ and _ Tess and hugged Debbie in the middle of the platform. But there is still the plea Tammy whispered to her before the introduction (“Please, please be discreet”), and so her mother’s question is half innocent curiosity and half laced with some lingering concern.

“Um,” says Tammy, drawing the single syllable out as far as she can in an attempt to buy herself a little time. She can’t figure out how she’s supposed to answer truthfully and still reassure her mum. In the end, the words she settles for are not particularly confident ones. “I don’t know. I think so. Maybe?”

Nodding, her mum gives a thoughtful hum. “Okay, well. You just let me know, then. I might be able to take you somewhere on my way to work.”

At this, Tammy feels a familiar rush of gratitude that she often gets around this woman, the absolute best mother she could have possibly asked for. Even if her mum’s fingers are tight on the steering wheel and she’s got just the slightest frown tugging at her eyebrows and creasing into her forehead, she’s trying. Tammy grins across the gear shift. “Thanks, Mum.”

It turns out she doesn’t get much of a chance to let her mother know anything at all, though, because a few days later, Lou Miller shows up at her doorstep unannounced.  _ Her _ doorstep is not exactly right – it’s Nadine’s doorstep, officially. Her mother’s best friend, who cleared space in her home for them when they had to let go of the house they used to live in with Tammy’s father. Nadine is cool and detached from Tammy at best; she doesn’t think the woman has ever liked her all that much, has perhaps been a little resentful of the fact that Tammy and her mother are so close. They’ve been living here for almost a year, now – for Tammy, minus the months she’s been away for school – and she still feels undeniably like she does not  _ fit _ here.

“Tamara,” she calls up the stairs, drumming her fingers on the wooden railing. It’s right in the middle of breakfast, which means she’s already unimpressed that someone is ringing the doorbell so early  _ and _ interrupting a family meal. Nadine’s family eats two meals a day together, sometimes three. Tammy prefers to skip the organized chaos of the kitchen, when she can, and has opted to pretend to sleep in today. There are a hundred minuscule things about the flow of everything at mealtimes that only remind her that Nadine and her husband, and her three children, have absorbed her mother into their routines and not left quite enough space for Tammy herself. “You have a… visitor.”

Her mother is framed in the kitchen doorway when Tammy makes it to the top of the stairs. For a heart-stopping moment, she sort of thought it might be Debbie, but that’s unrealistic for a girl who took months upon months just to ready herself to sit next to Tammy in the Great Hall. Still, Lou’s presence is unexpected – they’ve still only ever had one private conversation, just the two of them, in that empty classroom where Tammy tried to convince her to speak to Debbie again. She descends the stairs in a daze, trying to take in this incredibly out-of-place image. Lou Miller, standing tall with her hands in the pockets of a blue leather jacket and blonde bangs half-obscuring her eyes, on  _ Nadine’s _ doorstep. She feels rather as if she’s still dreaming.

Lou grins brightly when she reaches the ground floor and jingles a set of car keys, and Tammy tries to remember whether Debbie’s ever mentioned Lou being able to drive. “Tammy, hey. We’re going for a picnic,” she announces, like this is something not at all out of the ordinary.

“A… a picnic?” Tammy echoes, glancing past Nadine to her mother, who’s been stepping slowly further and further down the hallway to get close enough to look Lou in the eye. She’s short enough to be able to look directly up at Lou without the other girl’s hair getting in the way.

“You must be Tammy’s mum,” says Lou, sticking her hand out briskly for a handshake. She’s abrupt, perhaps, but polite; it’s something that she has to have learned as a member of a prominent pureblood family. “I’m Lou. I’m a friend of Tammy’s. As of, well, this year.”

Shaken by the phrasing –  _ I’m a friend of Tammy’s, a friend, a friend _ – Tammy looks uncertainly from the Slytherin girl to her mum and back again. Nadine hovers somewhere in the middle, eyeing Lou a little suspiciously. Up until this moment, Tammy herself has been the only witch that she knows. They had to tell her, last summer when they were moving into her house (it’s supposed to be temporary, though that seems to be stretching on far longer than anticipated), filling out paperwork from the Ministry to get it approved and everything. Nadine is less than pleased about the whole ordeal, though she’s keeping her mouth shut and allowing Tammy to come and go during the holidays, at the very least.

Her mother shakes Lou’s hand, and while the blonde’s grip might be strong enough to startle her just a little, she doesn’t react outwardly. “It’s nice to meet you, Lou. I’m Abby,” she introduces herself, and then, embarrassingly, “So who else is going on this picnic?”

On a slightly-crooked smile, Lou twirls her keys around by the ring. “Oh, everyone. Amita, Constance, Rose…” She’s ticking them off on her fingers, carefully peppering in the friends with familiar names as she goes. “Debbie, of course,” she adds, grinning at the too-obvious flicker of recognition in Tammy’s mother’s eyes. “We’re going to the beach, and I’ll have her home by dinner. Or, well, anytime you want.” She waits until Abby nods, then swivels to face Tammy. “You should maybe get dressed,” she suggests, shoving her hands back in her pockets as Tammy spins to head back upstairs. “I’ll just… wait out here.”

“No, no, please, come in,” says Nadine loudly, swinging the door open wider and doing her best not to sound  _ scandalized _ at the idea that she’d leave a stranger out on the front steps for longer than absolutely necessary. Maybe she’s not entirely comfortable with Lou sweeping into her house, but she’d rather that than have the neighbours see her hanging around outside. “You can go ahead and follow her up.”

“Thank you,” says Lou, perfectly polite, and then she’s off, half-jogging up the stairs in Tammy’s wake.

She sits on the pull-out couch where Tammy sleeps and surveys the room while she tries to pull clothes out of her trunk and cardboard boxes. Doesn’t say anything about the size of the room (spacious enough without the couch folded out this way, crowded with Tammy back for the summer) or the fact that it very clearly houses both her and her mother. Tammy is grateful for that, at least. “Are we really going to the beach?” she asks.

“You think I lied to your mother? Of course we’re going to the beach.” Frowning, Lou spreads out on her back like a starfish to look at the ceiling. Tammy watches her for a moment, forgetting temporarily that she’s supposed to be finding clothes. When the other girl notices, she frowns deeper. “What?”

“You have a way of making yourself at home, you know that?” Debbie has told her stories of how quickly she and Lou hit it off when they met as small children. Something about the ease with which Lou has settled into Nadine’s home makes it incredibly easy to picture that. Makes Tammy feel a bit off-balance, too, because Lou has gotten comfortable in five seconds flat, and she still considers herself an outsider here. Or maybe Lou is simply better at taking on that title. She slips into it like it fits her, like it doesn’t bother her.

Once the front door clicks shut behind them and they’re on their way down the path towards the street, Tammy is bracing herself for the questions.  _ So what’s the deal with your mum’s friend?  _ Or maybe,  _ You have a weird landlady.  _

But Lou still doesn’t ask, doesn’t pry, just tosses her keys into the air and catches them smoothly before hitting the button to unlock the car. It’s a nice car, which Tammy supposes she should have expected. The Millers are rich by wizard standards, and the vague dislike for Muggles that their faction of pureblood families shares doesn’t mean they don’t go all-out when it comes to Muggle commodities. It stands out where it’s parked between her mother’s and Nadine’s, flashy and red with what looks like several decorative keychains hanging by a string from the rearview mirror. “Let’s roll,” says Lou, barely waiting for her to buckle her seatbelt before she’s backing out of the driveway. “We’ve got a few stops to make.”

Tammy wonders if Debbie prepped her for Nadine, told her anything about the situation she and her mother have found themselves in, asked her to pick up Tammy first on purpose.

It turns out Lou is not a particularly  _ safe _ driver. 

Perhaps this is something Tammy should have predicted, too, but there is a big difference between guessing it and actually being in a moving vehicle with the blonde behind the wheel. She is daring when she probably shouldn’t be and pays too little attention to things like speed limits or turn signals, and she does this all with the windows down and the music turned up too loud. And only one hand on the steering wheel, casual as ever. Tammy spends most of the drive gripping the edge of her seat and trying not to look like she’s holding on, but she can’t contain the relieved sigh when they come to a stop and Lou cuts the engine.

They are in front of a three-story house with two chimneys and a sprawling yard, home to what looks like an entire preschool’s worth of children’s toys. Here, Lou doesn’t even bother getting out of the car, but instead honks the horn twice and leans across by Tammy’s knees to dig a pair of sunglasses out of the glove box. As she straightens back up again, a small boy – maybe eight or nine – practically sprints out of the house and across the lawn to skid to a stop next to the car. “Connie sent me,” he pants, “to tell you Nine’s not here yet.”

Lou ruffles his hair, dark and shiny and cut in a very precise bowl cut. “Thanks, Henry,” she says, and then he’s off again, front door slamming behind him when he gets inside. The blonde glances sideways at Tammy and slides her sunglasses over her eyes. “Nine invented her own Floo powder over Easter,” she explains, because of  _ course _ she has. The other girl might be Muggleborn, like Tammy, but she’s a thousand times more creative. She’s even figured out how to make a handful of electronic devices work at Hogwarts, of all places.

“Has she – you know, tested it?”

Shrugging, Lou drags her fingers purposefully through her bangs so they are still partially blocking her sight line. “No idea,” she admits, though she doesn’t look particularly worried. Tammy, for her part, is decidedly more concerned. Nine-Ball is probably the smartest person she knows, in that sort of way that transcends everyone else around her, but they’ve shared a dormitory in Ravenclaw Tower for six years. She’s certain she remembers the other girl smelling an awful lot like a minor explosion on more than one occasion.

Her frown clears when Constance Hong and Nine-Ball Stevenson tumble out of the house a few minutes later, all in one piece, and cut across the lawn towards them. Lou shifts in her seat and twists her key in the ignition again, and when her (their?) friends slide into the back seat, they bring with them the slightest scent of smoke. It makes its way out through the open window when Lou pulls back out onto the street, and this time, she spins the radio dial down so she can carry a conversation with her friends, blue eyes flashing up to look at them in the rearview mirror. Tammy wants to ask Nine about the Floo powder but becomes preoccupied with holding onto her seat again and trying to keep her face impassive, unsure how well it really works.

Nobody tells her they’re picking Debbie up, too, but she pieces it together when they come upon a wrought-iron gate. It’s been left ajar, and when Lou drives straight through the open space, Tammy catches a glimpse of an intricately-painted sign.  _ Ocean, _ it says, complete with waves cresting over the name. If the others notice the way she straightens up in her seat once they’re through the gate, they don’t say anything.

The driveway is long and winding, cutting through what seems to be more like a forest than a garden. Lou slows at the first curve, more careful on this unoccupied stretch of pavement than any street in London they’ve traveled today. When the trees drop away, it’s to make way for carefully-groomed grounds stretching twice as far as Nadine’s entire property, and a towering mansion made of stone with high-peaked roofs. This is precisely the sort of place Tammy imagines Debbie grew up in, but it seems that knowing this and seeing it with her own eyes are vastly different. 

Maybe the place even knocks the breath out of her, just a little bit.

They don’t go inside. This is probably for the best; her mind is already spinning into overdrive about how Debbie lives  _ here _ and her own mother doesn’t have so much as a small flat to her name anymore.

Debbie is waiting at the front door, and once Tammy sees her, everything else about the house seems to fall away. She watches the dark-haired girl stand and descend the steps, sees the way her lips curve into a smile when she spots Tammy in the passenger seat, and something about the way they lock eyes makes her think that maybe they’ve both forgotten about the existence of anyone else at all. Just momentarily, it’s as if in the whole world, there is only Debbie and there is only Tammy. Then Lou clears her throat pointedly and says, “You two are ridiculous,” and when Constance slides over to the middle seat to make space for Debbie, she steps on Nine’s foot and gets an indignant grumble in return, and the moment becomes less like a cliché romance novel and more like real life.

Still, she twists around in the passenger seat when Debbie climbs into the car, and Debbie leans around the back of the seat to kiss her soundly on the lips. As Lou throws the car into drive again and circles around to head back towards the road, and Debbie gets settled more safely in her seat next to Constance, all Tammy’s thoughts simply revolve around the fact that only a couple months ago, her life was decidedly not like this.

A couple months ago, kissing Debbie hello and spending time around her friends was entirely out of the question. They spent most of their sixth year sneaking around and spending time together at the top of the astronomy tower in the dead of night, an intricately-woven secret. This was in equal parts because Debbie wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet, and because Tammy’s friends and Debbie‘s didn’t particularly like each other. Mostly, this is due to Daphne and Lou’s constant head-butting – the Slytherin girls are nothing if not set in their ways, though they did spend a portion of June stubbornly putting up with each other so that Debbie and Tammy could see one another in daylight.

“Kluger’s bringing the others,” Lou announces, draping her arm out the window and drumming her fingers on the outside of the driver’s door at a stoplight. Not for the first time since the girl showed up on Nadine’s doorstep, Tammy wonders where this beach picnic plan sparked to life. Was it Debbie? Or was it Lou and Daphne, with that bullheaded determination to prove that they are okay with it all?

However it all came together, Tammy’s friends are waiting for them when Lou pulls into a gravel parking lot by the sea. They’re sitting on a picnic bench, all three of them in a line: Daphne Kruger and Rose Weil and Amita Chandra. She has never gotten to spend time with them over summer break before, always caught up in something else. Her old Muggle friends, sometimes. Her family, cut down to just her mum after her father’s death in second year. And last year, packing up and letting go of the house full of his memories to move in with her mum’s friend.

Amita leaps to her feet with an excitable wave; Daphne crosses over to meet them, the other two in tow, and raises her big sunglasses to eye Lou warily before turning to Tammy. “You survived Miller’s driving?” she double-checks, blunt as always.

“My driving is fine,” insists Lou. A blatant lie, but Tammy keeps her mouth shut. Daphne has clashed with Lou, repeatedly, since first year, and her attitude is only to be expected. But Tammy isn’t sure  _ she _ has reached the point where it’s allowed to come from her. She’s spent several years never saying a word to the blonde outside of their shared classes, thanks to Lou’s ongoing war with the ringleader of her own friends, and their absolute lack of real conversations barely even scrapes the surface on the rocky few weeks after Lou stumbled upon the secret alley where her best friend and Tammy met up on Hogsmeade weekends for odd little dates. That is slowly disappearing into the past, though – they’re speaking again now, and Lou is linking elbows with Debbie to drag her in the direction of the water. She watches this happen, the little grin on her girlfriend’s face, marvel’s for a moment at the fact that she gets to be close enough to see things like this now.

Rose lets go of Daphne’s hand to hug Tammy, skinny arms wrapping tight around her like it hasn’t been only a few days since they last saw each other. “What did I tell you? You’re not losing me,” she says when she pulls back, keeping her hands on Tammy’s shoulders. She somehow manages to smile at her and look very serious all at once. She said this on the last day of term, after the whole group of them spent the whole afternoon out by the lake. Maybe she’s easily distracted, but Rose is quite talented at this whole friendship thing. She is one year older than the rest of them and is officially a Hogwarts alumnus now, and she knew without Tammy saying a word that she was upset as graduation day drew closer. The thought of going back to Hogwarts in September and being short a friend isn’t something Tammy is looking forward to.

Oddly, it doesn’t take long for the eight of them to settle in around each other now, even in this strange world outside of school. They lay beach towels out over the sand in a messy patchwork rectangle, and it turns out someone has put Lou, Rose and Amita in charge of bringing food, which they produce out of their bags and the trunk of Lou’s car to set up an elaborate picnic.

They all fall into place with relative ease after that, and Debbie is touching Tammy in some way for almost the entire time – holding her hand, or her shoulder pressed to Tammy’s, or her legs draped across Tammy’s. It’s incredibly casual in a way that she never would have thought they could achieve last winter. The girl who kissed her with no warning and then ran away is gone, replaced by a girl who has opened up like a flower and grown warmer, softer, more confident.

Constance tugs Debbie down to the edge of the sand to stand ankle-deep in the waves, and Tammy lies back to examine the clouds. Almost every moment she spent with Debbie before has been at night, looking at the stars instead. She thinks she likes that better – night skies are prettier – but there is something comforting about this, nonetheless. She has never had a girlfriend before who can be around her friends like this; the only one before Debbie was Sarah, and spending time with her witch friends was absolutely out of the question, then. But Debbie’s friends and Tammy’s, for all of their faults and difficulties, fit together in a way that she never would have been able to predict.

It occurs to her that if she has spent nearly a year feeling like a puzzle piece that doesn’t belong in Nadine’s house, maybe these people are her puzzle.

“Don’t think too hard. It’s summer break, remember?” Lou sits down next to her and leans back on her elbows. Her eyes are entirely obscured by the artful combination of her sunglasses and her bangs, so Tammy can’t look there for any light that suggests she’s teasing, but she’s pretty sure that’s the case.

“I was just thinking, this is nice,” Tammy admits. There’s a cloud directly above her that looks sort of like a fluffy, misshapen heart. “Thank you.”

“For what?” she asks. Guarded, like maybe she’s a little bit hesitant to hear the answer. Lou looks rather as if she’s one of those people who doesn’t handle this sort of conversation particularly gracefully. She is harder – brittle with sharp edges and eye rolls, perhaps unconventional ways of showing she cares. She and Debbie are a good match, in that way. Tammy, for her part, likes to try to be more open.

Shrugging, she carefully studies that one cloud as it drifts across the bright, sunny blue backdrop of the sky. “This. I’ve never gotten to see people from school over the summer before, not anywhere but Diagon Alley.” On a pause, she props herself up on her elbows to match the other girl, eyes immediately finding Debbie’s form at the water’s edge. She’s with Amita, who is talking a hundred miles a minute and gesturing animatedly as she does. “So, you know, thank you. For making this happen.”

Lou doesn’t explicitly deny it, which is confirmation enough that she, at least, is one of the masterminds behind the outing. “Hey, if it gets me out of my house, I’m all for it,” she answers, and Tammy isn’t sure how much of that sentiment is a joke. She looks to Debbie and Amita, too, or Tammy thinks she does. “Besides, she spent a whole year thinking she couldn’t tell me about you, just because of Daphne. And when I found out, I just proved her right. I don’t want her to  _ actually _ be right. It was pretty shitty, knowing she was lying to me about something.” It is, Tammy thinks, the first time she has ever heard Lou refer to Daphne by anything other than her last name. The progress they’ve made manifests in unexpected ways. “I think she’s a lot happier with you,” says Lou, simple and matter-of-fact. “After everything she’s been through, she deserves that. I’m not going to be the one to fuck it up.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in mid-july, around the time that debbie's mother was admitted to the hospital last year, her world implodes all over again. she forgets, for just a moment, the next morning. like how sometimes, even still, she forgets about her mother when she opens her eyes – only this realization is an altogether different sort of crushing. she curls into a ball under the sheets like it will fend off the outside world. maybe she'll stay here all day long. maybe this will be her entire summer.

So far, this summer vacation is drastically different from last year’s. Better, though Deborah Eloise Ocean is not entirely sure how not to feel a little bit guilty for it.

Last year, she spent the first day of summer break saying goodbye to her brother and his girlfriend as they embarked on a post-graduation trip; she spent the second day being told that her mother was dying. The back half of July was filled with visits to St Mungo’s, and August passed in a blur. She remembers some of it in startling clarity – the funeral, the long days in the house all alone, sitting on the roof just outside her bedroom window to read her mother’s books. The rest of it is painted in streaks of sadness and mourning, no other real detail to be found. She recalls the smudged ink, the hastily-written words she sent to Tammy back when they still weren’t anything in particular, and the soft blue petals of the forget-me-nots that Tammy pressed between the pages of her reply. That letter, and every one that followed it at Christmas and Easter, are still stored carefully in her desk drawer; she doesn’t think she will ever be able to throw them away.

This summer, though, is inherently happier. She’s not certain exactly how much it counts when she’s still struggling so deeply with adjusting to the loss of one whole parent. Tammy has helped her work through it, and she has come a long way – the other girl is _ good _ at that, taking care of people, has her own experiences with loss and mourning – but sometimes, Debbie still wakes up in the morning and forgets, just for a moment. She still feels unsteady and off-balance when something reminds her of it. There is still this heavy, sinking sense of guilt when she spends too long without thinking about her – which has been a lot, the past few months, as her relationship with Tammy grew and her relationship with Lou essentially imploded.

Sixth year was a rollercoaster.

She _ thinks _ she has wound up feeling far more secure about herself than she ever did before. She’s in love with Tammy, her _ girlfriend, _ and despite the major hiccup that came in the form of Lou finding out just what the secret she’d been keeping was, that friendship is steadily on the mend. Her friends and Tammy’s have been spending time around each other for the past few weeks, and it’s all new and foreign and a little bit scary, but she likes Tammy’s friends. She’s told Danny and Tess about Tammy, and rather than turning out badly like she’d prepared herself for, it went _ well. _

There is still a long way to go – she’s not exactly ready to broadcast to the entirety of Hogwarts that she’s got incredibly real feelings for Tammy Prescott, and she certainly hasn’t breathed a word to her father – but progress is progress. The first time she kissed Tammy, it ended in avoiding her for days on end; now she feels perfectly comfortable sitting at the beach all day with their fingers interlaced.

“Hey,” says Amita from somewhere behind her, and she twists to smile softly at the Hufflepuff girl. She followed Constance down to the water’s edge ten minutes ago and has since been abandoned – Constance is easily distracted and has become entirely absorbed in building a sandcastle with Rose – but Debbie has remained where she is, toes sinking into wet sand as each wave rolls at her ankles. “You good?”

“I’m okay,” answers Debbie, distant. She feels bad, dragging her pre-existing sadness into an otherwise very nice day. She’s certain Amita doesn’t believe her, but the other girl lets it go. They have not been friends for long enough that pressuring Debbie for a real answer is a good option, and maybe Amita is just that type of friend – the kind who will listen if you want to talk, and go off on a conversational tangent of her own if you don’t. She appreciates this, and lets Amita be the one to choose the topic now.

“I should probably tell you at some point – before it, like, gets weird to admit it, you know? – that I knew,” says Amita, all in a rush and out of nowhere, halfway into a whole other conversation. Debbie frowns, confused, and Amita hurries on, arms and hands moving exaggeratedly to accentuate her words. “About you, I mean. Tammy told me before Christmas but she wouldn’t tell me who you were, and she made me swear not to tell anyone, but I feel like since you’re you and we all know now, it’s okay, and it just felt kind of strange _ not _ to tell you, so…” She trails off and squints at Debbie nervously. “Are you mad? God, shit. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything –”

She reaches out so her fingertips brush at Amita’s elbow, stilling her movements. Just for a moment, because Amita does not seem to regularly remain in one place. “It’s okay,” she tells the Hufflepuff girl, as reassuring as she can manage. Isn’t quite sure how well she does, because _ reassuring _ isn’t something she’s got a lot of expertise in. It’s easy enough to picture Tammy trusting Amita with information about her, keeping Debbie’s name held carefully under her tongue. Tammy has spent the majority of their relationship so far quietly allowing her to keep them a secret, and it makes sense that she needed someone to talk to. The buzz of desperately wanting to tell someone about her is familiar. Maybe if she had known earlier, she would have been upset, but now it’s simply easy to understand. “I’m not mad. Thanks for telling me. And for… not telling anyone else, before.”

Amita positively beams. Her eyes light up when she smiles, and dimples crease in her cheeks. “You’re welcome,” she answers, sincere and relieved. And then, hesitant again, “I was worried you’d be one of those girls who’s just experimenting, you know? That you’d break her heart or something. I’m really glad you’re… well, you.”

“You didn’t even really know me, when you all found out,” points out Debbie. She doesn’t know why she does, why she can’t just accept the roundabout compliment and move on. Maybe that just seems too easy.

Shrugging, the other girl examines her carefully. It’s as if she can see right through Debbie’s eyes and into her soul, somehow. She is constantly surprised by just how perceptive Tammy’s friends are; hers are not always quite so aware of their surroundings and the people around them. It should feel a little uncomfortable, shouldn’t it? When she has spent her entire life being able to hide parts of herself away, and now there are people like Rose and Amita to catch her? Somehow, though, it’s almost nice. “Maybe not,” agrees Amita. She keeps her voice carefully light as she says it. That’s another thing about how much attention she pays, and Debbie is mostly grateful for it – it’s like she knows Debbie shies away from the deep, serious conversations. “But I could tell right away how much you care about her. The type of person I was worried about wouldn’t love her nearly that much.”

— • —

In mid-July, around the time that Debbie’s mother was admitted to the hospital last year, her world implodes all over again.

It starts out like a perfectly normal day. Her father is out, maybe went into the Ministry even though it’s a Saturday – this is not noteworthy, really. He doesn’t stay home much, especially not since the funeral. Debbie thinks maybe the house feels off-balance to him without her mum, too. She doesn’t see her friends today but stays home, opens all the windows around the ground floor of the house, writes a letter to Tammy. She organizes the bookshelves in her room, a delicate balance between her own books and the ones of her mother’s that she has saved, and brings one of them downstairs to read over a late breakfast. She’s starting to run out of her mother’s books to read for the first time, now, plans to drag it out a little.

The _ Daily Prophet _ lies on the kitchen counter, where she tossed it without really looking when she paid the delivery owl this morning. She flips it over to lie face up and freezes, mid-reach for a box of cereal, when the picture on the front page catches her eye. It’s a line-up of five pictures in a row, one after the other, and the headline reads, _ Stolen Dark Artefacts: Ministry members among prime suspects. _

The middle picture is of her father.

Flattening the newspaper out to lean closer, Debbie scans through the article for more information. It turns out that important artefacts from the Ministry of Magic, including evidence about incarcerated dark wizards, have been going missing, resurfacing periodically in black markets or simply disappearing without a trace. They are taken smoothly and silently, and anonymous Aurors are cited throughout the article, speculating that there are members of the Ministry behind it. Members of the Ministry with potential ties to dark wizards. Members of the Ministry who have recently vanished practically into thin air, as the investigation gets started.

She drinks in every word and cannot make sense of a single one.

An owl taps at the window, and she has no idea how long it’s been, how long she has been standing here. She has all but forgotten about the cereal she was planning on eating. In a sort of daze, she moves to the window and recognizes the owl to be Lou’s. 

_ I just read the paper, _ her best friend has scrawled in all caps. _ Are you okay? Is your dad okay? _She fires off more questions, then signs off. In between the last question and her name, she has squished in an offer to come over and keep Debbie company. It looks like an afterthought, something tacked on just before she sent the letter. Debbie knows her well enough to be certain that it’s not the idea of coming over that was forgotten at first, but rather the thought that she might need to explicitly say it. Like she remembered, at the very last moment, that this is the sort of news that might make Debbie go cold and still and numb through all her insides.

She can’t bring herself to answer, not yet. Dropping the letter next to the abandoned newspaper, she moves out of the kitchen and up the stairs, slow like she’s trying to wade through water. Coming to a stop in the doorway to her parents’ bedroom, she surveys the room before her. Every other time she has come up here in the last year, it has been to search for things of her mother’s. Now, she lets her gaze sweep over everything, looking for something perhaps more sinister. Something to give her a clue about her father’s involvement in the article downstairs. She crosses past the neatly-made bed to the closet, pulls its door open and stares into it like the man’s pressed suits and ties and robes will whisper his secrets to her.

They don’t, naturally. She circles the room to look at all of his belongings, then goes around again, and again. Maybe if she passes by each one enough times, spends enough time in here, something will actually begin to click into place.

Downstairs, an indeterminable amount of time later, there is a sharp, purposeful knock at the door. She descends the stairs slowly, watching the blurry silhouette of someone’s side through the decorative frosted glass pane next to the front door, trying to figure out if it’s Lou. Maybe she’s grown worried in the absence of a reply to her letter and opted to simply show up – this feels like a decidedly Lou-like thing to do.

When she makes it to the front hall and turns the doorknob, though, the person on the doorstep is most definitely not Lou.

It’s Harry Potter.

He stands with his hands in the pockets of his robes, casual despite the fact that she’s pretty sure one hand is curled around a wand, all round glasses and messy dark hair, just like he is in all the pictures. She’s only ever seen him a handful of times from afar; he doesn’t always make it to King’s Cross with the rest of his family. The downside of a demanding job, she’s sure, like her father. Or maybe, it seems, not like her father at all. He’s shorter than she imagined, and he has three other Aurors behind him, and they all look incredibly serious.

Debbie thinks maybe she’s dreaming. Maybe none of this is real, not the stolen Ministry items or the _ Prophet _ article or Harry fucking Potter at her front door.

“Is Elijah Ocean here?” he asks, and all Debbie can do is shake her head. There is perhaps a little sympathy in his eyes, or maybe she’s imagining that. She has shared a dormitory with his daughter for six years, after all, and hung around her a lot during that dark period a few months ago when Lou wasn’t speaking to her. She wonders if he knows anything about her, besides who her father is. If Lily ever told him anything about her, not just this year, but from the very beginning. “Do you know where he is?” Another shake of her head, and he opts for a question she can’t answer without words this time. “Can you tell us the last time you saw him?”

“Um, yesterday morning, before he went to work,” she answers. Her voice comes out small, sounds fragile. She hates that. She clears her throat and tries to come across more like an adult than a scared child. “He said he’d be home late, so.”

Two of the Aurors glance at each other swiftly and then away again. Potter only nods, green eyes flickering over her shoulder into the depths of the house. “Would you mind if we came in, took a look around?” he asks now.

It’s not really a question; one of them produces a search warrant a moment later, and Debbie quietly moves aside to let them file past her. They split into teams of two and move seamlessly from room to room, while Debbie remains rooted in one place at the foot of the stairs.

“There’s no trace of him,” one Auror reports when they all make their way back to the front hall. “You received an owl earlier,” she adds, directly to Debbie. “Was it from your father?”

“How long have you,” starts Debbie, almost indignantly, as if she has any idea how long it’s actually been since Lou’s owl appeared. But she stops herself and begins again, this time decidedly more cooperative. Of course they’re watching the house. Her father is a prime suspect, and the _ Prophet _ has given everyone a head’s up about it. “No, it was from my best friend. She saw the newspaper. That’s all.” They look skeptical at best; she supposes they’ve probably had people lie to them about that before, and they have been given no reason to take her word for it. She spins for the kitchen. “You can see the letter, if you want.”

Reading Lou’s words seems satisfactory enough that Potter sends his colleagues outside, but he hangs back, drumming his fingers on the counter and looking down at the article in the _ Daily Prophet. _She has left it face-up there, her father’s picture pointed up at the ceiling in black and white. “I’d like to leave a couple Aurors here,” he says conversationally, “in case your father comes back.”

“Do you think he won’t?” Debbie inquires. Maybe this is the wrong question. _ Do you think he will? _ seems like it could be more accurate.

He sighs lightly. “I don’t know. It doesn’t – I never asked your name.”

“Deborah. Debbie,” she supplies.

“Debbie,” he repeats. “I’m Harry.” _ I know, _ she wants to say, but it’s not the time, and he probably gets that a lot, anyway. “It doesn’t look good, Debbie. If there are no grounds for making him a suspect, why would he disappear now? I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve found the innocent aren’t usually the ones who run.”

— • —

Two Aurors, a man and a woman, are stationed around the house.

They take it in shifts: One of them in a sleek dark car across the street from the Oceans’ gated driveway, the other inside. This mostly involves pacing around the living room and the kitchen, over and over and over. She tries to find the fine line between not getting in their way and not appearing suspicious by avoiding them.

Around dinnertime, Debbie brings blankets and pillows from one of the guest rooms down, in case they want to sleep later, but she doubts they will – neither of them show any signs of stopping to rest. She makes herself scrambled eggs because it’s easy and mindless, only eats half because her appetite has evaporated. Hovering in the kitchen doorway until the woman in the living room reaches the wall and turns back to face her, she gestures vaguely to the fridge. “You guys can help yourself if you’re hungry,” she offers.

Danny shows up when he finishes work, Tess in tow as he barrels through the front door. “Sorry I couldn’t give you any warning,” are the first words out of his mouth when he locks eyes with Debbie. “If he was here, it could have screwed up the whole thing. You okay?”

It’s around now that everything falls into place, the vague details she was able to pull out of people at St Mungo’s when her brother wound up in there over Easter. How well they match up with the more concrete information she’s got now. How Danny got caught in the crossfire of six different spells at once. Wide-eyed, Debbie takes a step back before he can get closer. “Did you know, before? When you got hurt, did you know?”

“No, Deb, I –” He hesitates, just briefly, glances to the Auror in the doorway of the next room. They have let him in without any questions, a perk of being one of them. He has spent a year barrelling through their training program and onto the field. Maybe he wouldn’t have been caught off-guard by finding himself face-to-face with Harry Potter; the war hero is his boss, and they have undoubtedly spoken before. “I swear, I didn’t know. They… they were wearing masks.”

Debbie searches his eyes carefully, looking for any sign that he’s lying. Her brother can be difficult to read sometimes, but she can always tell when he’s lying to her. It’s like how Lou knows she has a tell, won’t tell Debbie what it is in case she consciously stops herself from doing it. Danny’s tell is the way he furrows his eyebrows, just slightly, as the words come out. It’s only the barest of movements, nearly undetectable to anyone who’s not paying attention. She wonders if Tess knows it, too. But his brows remain perfectly normal now, and so she relaxes a bit, steps forward and lets him hug her. “Do you really think it was him?”

“I don’t know,” he answers, arms encircling her shoulders carefully. There is a certain safety here, a familiarity, and it feels like the only stable thing she has right now. “There were five guys in that article. Two are in custody, seemed to go willingly enough. But the others just… disappeared. It doesn’t look good.”

_ It doesn’t look good. _ The echo of Potter’s words is putting it lightly, she thinks, because it looks an awful lot like her father is a criminal. She can’t figure out how to wrap her head around this properly, but the strange disconnected feeling begins to slowly seep away now, with Danny and Tess here. Last year, she felt incredibly alone after her mother’s funeral; Danny was going through the Auror program and Tess was starting out at her Ministry job, and isolating herself from everything else was easy, felt natural, like it was what she really needed. This is undoubtedly different, but she feels endlessly grateful for his presence, this time around.

They sleep in Danny’s old room. After months growing used to this house being quiet, ever since last summer, the building is now filled with the sounds of other people – sleep-even breathing down the hall, feet pacing the same paths throughout the ground level below. Debbie falls asleep easier this way, despite the thoughts racing and spiralling in her head. It feels more like Hogwarts, to have people nearby.

She forgets, for just a moment, the next morning. Like how sometimes, even still, she forgets about her mother when she opens her eyes – only this realization is an altogether different sort of crushing. She curls into a ball under the sheets like it will fend off the outside world. Maybe she’ll stay here all day long.

She listens to the house stirring to life around her, the front door opening and closing as the Aurors downstairs trade off shifts. At half past nine, Danny knocks on her bedroom door and pokes his head inside; Debbie lifts the corner of her blanket to squint at him with one eye. “Did you get the day off work or something?” she asks.

“Not exactly. I’m taking a shift,” he explains, shrugging nonchalantly. Debbie wonders if she will ever be able to detach herself from the events of her life the way he does. Yet she remembers talking to him at Christmas, lying on their backs underneath the tree like they always used to with their mother. She’d just spent a few months learning from Tammy how to talk about the parent she had lost, and she wanted to know if Danny talked about her, too. _ I don’t think I know how to talk about her, _ Danny said. So maybe bottling everything up isn’t something to aspire to. She looks at him curiously as he steps further into her room, trying to gauge how he’s doing, but it’s hard. He’s got a lot of practice with appearing to be put-together. “I made breakfast. You should come and eat. Get dressed first, though – there’s a few Aurors down there.”

Maybe this will be her entire summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> debbie's second chapter in ttsn 🤝 debbie's second chapter in utgtm  
ruining debbie's life and making her emotionally shut down as a result
> 
> (i didn't know how to space that out properly or if it would work on ao3, so here we are.
> 
> hands up if you can connect this thing with debbie's dad with what foreshadowed it in the first fic, because i absolutely did work in a significant clue! man, deb just can't catch a break. i'm sorry for the lack of tammy in this chapter, but we'll be seeing her lots next week, when abby prescott is a fantastic mother as usual, nadine is forced to interact with lou again, and debbie eats a grilled cheese sandwich. which is, of course, a very notable activity.
> 
> please drop your comments or kudos here, or feel free to yell your thoughts at me on twitter (@deboceans)! i'm currently yelling on there a lot about a whole new au i'm planning out for these two idiots over there, so if you want to check in on that... it's a thing. thank you for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there is a sleek black car with tinted windows parked across the street, and when lou opens her door and stretches her long legs to stand, a woman crosses over to flash an auror badge pinned inside her thin jacket. “you can’t go up there right now,” she says smoothly, and tammy’s heart sinks. they are so close. all she wants is to look debbie in the eye and make sure she’s okay, or as okay as she can be. the auror looks lou up and down, glances down to tammy and her mother in the car. is she here to protect debbie, or watch her? could it be both? “identification?”
> 
> “lou miller,” replies lou, and all the anxiety from before has evaporated into thin air. lou’s really good at convincing people to break rules for her, debbie told her over easter break. last summer, when debbie’s mother was in st mungo’s, the slytherin girl apparently talked herself, constance, and nine-ball past the family-only rule.

It seems that good things are fleeting, never seem to last as long as she would like them to. Tammy learned this a long time ago, before her father died, and has been reminded of it, time and time again, ever since. There is always that good stretch, the part where she gets her hopes up and thinks maybe, this will be it. She gets past waiting for the other shoe to drop and lets herself be lulled into a false sense of security, and then some curveball is thrown at her with no warning at all. Curveballs like losing the house and having to move in with Nadine. Curveballs like Debbie steadfastly ignoring her for days on end after their first kiss, or like Lou rounding that corner on a Hogsmeade trip in May and finding out about them like  _ that. _

Curveballs like Thursdays’ copy of the  _ Daily Prophet, _ which Lou thrusts at her when she opens the front door early on Sunday morning. She has taken special care to knock instead of ringing the doorbell, but it doesn’t really matter; Sundays are a day that Nadine and Oliver ensure everyone is up and out of bed, and they’re currently milling around the kitchen, shoveling eggs and bacon onto plates before church. Church is precisely why Sundays are Tammy’s favourite day, in Nadine’s house; she and her mother get the place to themselves, once everyone else is ushered out the door.

Judging by the rather grim expression on Lou’s face, though, today looks like it might shape up a little differently. “Have you seen this?” she asks abruptly. Tammy hasn’t. She reads the  _ Prophet _ during the school year, or at least gives Amita’s copy a cursory glance each morning, but she doesn’t have the spare money for a subscription. Besides, in this house, it’s probably best to keep wizarding newspapers out of sight, anyway. 

“Seen what?” she replies blankly, and then she looks down and she  _ sees it, _ and an answer becomes altogether unnecessary. Her eyes are drawn immediately to the most recognizable face on the front page: Elijah Ocean, Wizengamot member, Debbie’s father. “Shit,” she hisses, barely even remembering to check whether Nadine or her husband are in earshot. “Shit. Is Debbie okay? Have you talked to her?”

“She hasn’t written me back.” Lou edges her way into the house, jingling her keys with a nervous energy that Tammy has never seen attached to her before. “I was hoping you’d heard something.”

Tammy shakes her head, frown deepening drastically. “No, I haven’t – she hasn’t written for a couple days, but that’s sort of normal, and…”

Her mother slips out of the kitchen, smiling. “Hi, Lou. Do you want,” she starts, and then cuts herself off as she registers the twin worried expressions on their faces. “Is everything okay?”

Wordlessly, Tammy hands off the newspaper. She lets her mother take in the headline, the pictures, and jabs her finger at the centre image. “It’s Debbie’s dad,” she explains, but can’t bring herself to say much more. Spinning back to Lou, she twists her fingers together nervously. She likes to consider herself someone who’s good in a crisis, but right now, she’s at a loss. “What do we do?”

Shaking her head and not bothering to fix where her bangs settle, Lou looks from Tammy to her mum. “I – I was thinking of driving over to see her. Just… showing up. I wrote when this thing broke, right away, and I haven’t heard a thing – and there was another article yesterday, I didn’t bring it. He’s disappeared. Nobody knows where he is.” She sounds more nervous than Tammy has ever thought she could, sentences decidedly longer than the usual cool, detached way she speaks. It only serves to make Tammy’s concern grow. “Is it… is it okay if Tammy comes, too?”

Her mum insists on driving, refusing to let them go on their own. “This is a delicate situation, honey,” she sighs when Tammy’s eyes widen in alarm. Which is how they wind up leaving Lou’s fancy car at the curb and resignedly sliding into Abby’s car. Tammy moves her seat uncomfortably far forward so the other girl has a bit of extra leg room, and Lou guides them in the direction of Debbie’s house. If this were happening on any other day, Tammy would be unable to focus on anything besides the fact that her mum and Debbie don’t know each other well yet, and that Debbie’s house is huge and everything in it is expensive, and that her mother’s car tends to make clunky noises like a part of it is dying when it goes up steep hills or gets low on gas. Today, she manages to push most of that aside. She is incredibly aware of Lou’s leg bouncing worriedly behind her, the way the blonde’s knee is making her seat move, just a little. Every thought twisting in her head starts and ends with Debbie.

The gate is not left open today, the way it has been every other time they go. There is a sleek black car with tinted windows parked across the street, and when Lou opens her door and stretches her long legs to stand, a woman crosses over to flash an Auror badge pinned inside her thin jacket. “You can’t go up there right now,” she says smoothly, and Tammy’s heart sinks. They are so  _ close. _ All she wants is to look Debbie in the eye and make sure she’s okay, or as okay as she can be. The Auror looks Lou up and down, glances down to Tammy and her mother in the car. Is she here to protect Debbie, or watch her? Could it be both? “Identification?”

“Lou Miller,” replies Lou, and all the anxiety from before has evaporated into thin air.  _ Lou’s really good at convincing people to break rules for her, _ Debbie told her over Easter break. Last summer, when Debbie’s mother was in St Mungo’s, the Slytherin girl apparently talked herself, Constance, and Nine-Ball past the family-only rule. “I believe you might know –”

She doesn’t get any further, though the slight flicker of recognition in the Auror’s eyes tells Tammy that she might have been getting somewhere, whatever she was going to say. A figure is approaching on the other side of the gate, silhouetted through the bars by the bright sunlight. “Lou?” It’s not Debbie, but her brother, bearing a plate of waffles. “Did Debbie write to you? She isn’t really supposed to send –”

“No, she didn’t. I wouldn’t turn up unannounced right  _ now _ if she’d just told me how she’s doing,” snaps Lou, patience cracking. Her blue eyes flash as she turns to him, but she softens after that. “Please let me in. I – I brought Tammy. We just want to see her.”

He crouches a little to look in through Tammy’s open window. Doesn’t say a word, just nods to her and to her mother. “Julie, these ones are fine,” he says to the Auror. He’s got his own badge pinned to his shirt, and holds out the waffles with a characteristic grin. He gestures to Lou, then Tammy. “Debbie’s best friend, and her girlfriend. This is a lot, you know? She needs to not be alone.” Lowering his voice, but not quite enough to really render the words private, he adds, “Please, Jules. She’s got this tendency to – to isolate. It’s not so great for her to be cut off like this.”

Julie eyes him warily, but nods. “If Potter gives me shit for this, I’m telling him it was you,” she informs him loftily, and then saunters back to her car with her plate of waffles.

Danny pulls the gate wide open. “Hey, can I hitch a ride back up?” he asks, folding himself into the back seat when Tammy’s mother nods. “Thanks. It’s a bit of a walk, and I can’t Apparate any closer.” He leans forward, not bothering to buckle his seatbelt as the car starts to slowly wind along the driveway. “Thanks for coming, too. She’s doing… okay. Not talking too much. You know how she gets. I think she’s been sleeping all right, but she’s only eating, like, one meal a day.”

Twisting in the passenger seat, Tammy lets her gaze sweep over him head to toe, to the best of her ability, taking in every part of him she can see. “And how are you doing?”

He’s maybe slightly taken aback by the question, the fact that she’s asking  _ him _ at all when they both know she’s here for Debbie, but he shrugs and answers it, anyway. “I’m all right. It’s tough, you know? We’ve got Aurors here twenty-four hours a day, and Tess and I have been staying here. They’ve given me some time off, given… everything, but I’m taking some shifts on watch. I’m here already, right? But we’ve got… no clue where my dad is. He’s not even charged with anything yet, he’s just a suspect. But running off like this… isn’t good. It’s almost evidence all on its own.” He meets her mum’s eyes in the rearview mirror and adds sincerely, “Thank you for bringing them, Abby. You can just park right in front here.”

Her mother doesn’t say a word about the elegant, sprawling house as she cuts the engine off, but she’s a little wide-eyed as they reach the front steps. Tammy has tried to imagine just what the house looks like on the inside, but she’s too focused on Debbie right now to really take it in for the first time as Danny pushes the front door open. Debbie who’s doing okay but not talking too much, not eating enough, isolating herself in this place like she did last year when her mother passed away. She vaguely registers a sweeping staircase curving up to the second floor, high ceilings, glittering chandeliers.

Danny leads her mother towards what can only be the kitchen, down the hall towards the back of the house, and Tess appears in the doorway. “She’s upstairs,” she says simply, and then smiles softly to Tammy’s mum. She takes the presence of newcomers in stride, of course. Just a brief flicker of surprise in her eyes, and that’s it. “Abby, hi. Would you like some tea?”

Hand closing loosely around Tammy’s wrist, Lou tugs her towards the stairs. “Come on,” she murmurs. She has been here countless times before, evidently. Her feet tread an obviously-familiar path that Tammy follows like she’s in some kind of trance. They come to a stop outside a door where Lou knocks, but the blonde doesn’t wait for an answer before swinging it inward. “You really should write back to me, you know,” she says by way of greeting. Tammy hangs back a little, hovering in the doorway as Lou strides purposefully into Debbie’s room. “I think there’s an Auror at the end of your driveway who’s not a huge fan of mine right now.”

Debbie scrambles to sit up in bed, all messy hair and darkened circles under her eyes. She’s beautiful, even going through hell like this. “Lou, what are you doing here?” she mumbles, and then Tammy can pinpoint the exact moment Debbie spots her. There’s something that twists unexpectedly in her face, sort of crumples  _ just so,  _ and it makes Tammy forget she was trying not to intrude and cross the room in long, stretched-out steps to kneel on the edge of her bed and wrap her arms tight around the other girl’s shoulders, pressing her face into dark hair. “Tammy,” says Debbie, muffled into the space between her chest and her shoulder.

“I’m sorry this is happening,” she whispers back. Distantly, she registers Lou announcing that she’s going to give them a minute and backing out of the room again, feels a little bad for it because Lou is Debbie’s best friend and should be in here. But she pulls back just enough to brush Debbie’s hair back and tuck pieces of it behind each ear, and she frames the Gryffindor girl’s face in her hands and kisses her fiercely enough to convey everything she wants to.  _ I’m here. I’m with you. I’m sorry. _ Debbie laces her fingers together at the back of her neck and kisses her again, leaning back into too many pillows and pulling Tammy with her.

When the kiss breaks, Tammy shifts to lie next to her and trails one fingertip down Debbie’s nose. “I’m sorry I didn’t write,” says Debbie, and she shakes her head, hair whispering against the pillow.  _ It’s okay, _ she thinks, hoping it’s clear enough in her face to get the message across. She has seen Debbie like this before, more times than she would like. Her girlfriend has this tendency to go numb when faced with difficulty, to simply shut down rather than deal with it head-on. She did this after her mother died, when she kissed Tammy last fall, when Danny was in the hospital at Easter, when Lou found out about them and stopped speaking to her. And now, with her father somewhere out there, apparently a criminal. “I just don’t know what to think. It doesn’t… feel real.”

Lou pokes her head back into the room a few minutes later, dramatically covering her eyes with one hand. “Are you two decent?” she asks, and Tammy offers her a tiny smile because it’s so clear that she’s trying to coax a laugh out of Debbie that doesn’t come. The blonde all but drags Debbie out of her bed and into the hallway, a blanket draped around her shoulders like a cape with one corner trailing in her wake. To their credits, nobody downstairs bats an eye at this when they make it to the kitchen. Business-like, Lou begins to pull food out of the fridge and pantry, and Tammy hovers close behind Debbie’s chair when she sits, trying to decide whether it will be reassuring or smothering if she rests her hands on the other girl’s shoulders. Her mother alternates between frowning worriedly in Debbie’s direction and quite purposefully looking anywhere else, as if she thinks that makes her concern less obvious.

Tess is pouring tea into decidedly expensive teacups, looking on while Lou reaches for a frying pan. “Grilled cheese sandwiches? Isn’t it a little early for that?”

The immediate response is a determined head shake. “Debbie can’t turn down grilled cheese,” says Lou, and it turns out she’s right. It’s a slow-going process, but when she places a plate in front of the other girl, Debbie wordlessly picks up the sandwich there. Tammy maneuvers into the seat next to her, and Debbie reaches absently for her hand, and they sit like that while Lou resolutely makes small talk with everyone in the room, effectively ensuring that nobody is simply watching her. There is a rush of affection deep in Tammy’s bones at this, the way this girl hates to show vulnerability but will drop everything to take care of someone she loves to the very best of her ability.

Eventually, though, the conversation tilts in the direction of something more serious. With another Auror passing through the kitchen every few minutes as he circles around the house, the gravity of the situation cannot be ignored entirely for long. With Tammy’s mother here, the only parent out of all of them, it is inevitable that she is going to ask. She wants details, the type of details that a Muggle woman cannot pick up easily from the words used in that newspaper article. She wants to know what, exactly, Elijah Ocean may have done. After that, she switches her focus to Debbie and Danny. How they’re doing, what it’s like here alone, whether it’s safe for them to be staying here.

And if there’s anything she can do to help. Like bring food. Or, after she excuses herself to go to the bathroom and stands down the hall whispering into her cell phone instead of actually going, if it would be helpful for Debbie to come stay with them.

“Oh, no,” starts Debbie immediately, eyes going wide. Tammy, too, twisting to look at her mum in surprise. It seems like a terrible idea and a wonderful one all at once – there’s a million good things about the thought of getting Debbie away from an Auror-patrolled house, like maybe it will help her to escape this numbness, but there is also Nadine and her family there, just another kind of watchful eye.

But Danny is nodding thoughtfully. “That’s… not a bad idea, actually.” He catches the tension building in his little sister’s shoulders immediately, and she can barely cross her arms defensively over her chest before he leans forward to meet her eyes. His tone is low and serious when he speaks again. “Listen, Deb, I don’t mean, like,  _ sending you away _ or anything. It’s just that us being here, it makes it harder for these people to do their jobs. They have to focus on making sure we’re safe, too. None of us know what might happen. And the flat isn’t really big enough to –”

“I stayed there at Easter,” Debbie objects, cutting him off. Everyone else has gone incredibly quiet. Tess exchanges a look with Tammy’s mum and they carefully stand together to clear dishes and teacups away from the table. Tammy should move, too, but she doesn’t. Her presence is going to affect the way this goes, but she and Lou remain seated, one on each side of Debbie.

Danny sighs. “That was different, and you know it.” He glances to Lou, then to Tammy. Neither of them jump in to back him up; he pinches the bridge of his nose with a deep frown. “Wouldn’t you rather be with Tammy than here?” he asks, and God, she should have gotten up to help Tess and her mother. “You can see your friends and try to enjoy the rest of the summer a little bit. It might do you some good to get out of this house.”

“Enjoy the rest of the summer,” Debbie repeats, deadpan. “Are you kidding me?” But she reaches for Tammy’s hand and squeezes it lightly, and lets Lou accompany her upstairs again to pack some things.

Reaching out for Tammy’s elbow, her mum holds her back from following. “I’m sorry I did that without asking you first,” she says quietly, so nobody else can hear. “I just hate to think of them – of her – being here with all of this going on. Is this okay with you?”

She smiles. It’s a soft, small sort of smile. Today doesn’t seem like the type of day for a bigger or brighter one. “Yeah, Mum, it’s okay.” Under any other circumstances, this would probably turn the rest of summer break into the best summer break ever: Endless amounts of time with Debbie, after almost a year confined to only the astronomy tower after curfew. But then there is Debbie’s father, and Nadine and Oliver, and the Aurors positioned around the Oceans’ spacious home. Maybe, given some time, little pieces of the other factors will flake away and leave long, golden-tinted afternoons in their place. “What about Nadine?”

Her mother waves a hand. “Nadine is fine with it, I spoke to her.” Tammy thinks  _ fine with it _ is perhaps an exaggeration; her mum’s best friend has been wary about magic ever since she learned of its existence, and isn’t likely to be excited about the prospect of a second witch burrowing into her home. Maybe she hides her distaste from Tammy’s mother better than anyone else, or maybe Abby is simply less sensitive to it. “I didn’t tell her everything, just that you’ve got a friend who needs somewhere to stay. She wants to help.”

Privately, Tammy thinks that Nadine probably would rather get the credit for it than actually help, but she doesn’t say so. The woman has been there for her mum through endless hard times since her dad’s death, whatever her thoughts towards Tammy herself are.

She is waiting when they return to her house, welcomes Debbie on a tight smile but seems rather relieved that she hasn’t come with all the accessories that Tammy did – no broomstick, two duffel bags instead of a bulky trunk, Lilith and her cage transferred to Danny and Tess’ flat for the time being. There is even an effort made towards something like a welcome dinner later, complete with extra chairs brought out to fit in Tammy and Debbie and even Lou. The whole thing feels absolutely surreal, Debbie and Lou sitting across from Michael and Mara and Miriam. It’s two worlds colliding in a way she could never have prepared for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (and oh my god, they were roommates.)
> 
> this is a little on the late side for being posted because it's canadian thanksgiving! well, monday is. but my family had our dinner tonight, so we'll say it counts. so this year, i'm grateful for you! as always, but especially tonight, thank you for reading and for leaving comments and kudos! it means a lot to me, really.
> 
> i'll see you next week, when paint colours are chosen, michael asks a question, and tammy takes debbie on a date. just because. soft hours.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tammy takes her to a muggle thrift store, tells her it’s the one where she found the sweater she gave debbie for christmas. before, she couldn’t have imagined that she might enjoy a place like this so much, but they return to the house with a hefty collection of muggle novels that debbie has never seen before. late at night, to quiet her mind when all the thoughts there are alternating from the fact that her dad is still missing to the fact that her girlfriend is so distractingly good at making her forget about the first fact, she reads.

She hates to admit it when other people are right, but maybe Danny was. Maybe it  _ is  _ good for her to get out of the house with all its empty space and quiet spots, to force herself to interact with other human beings, to gain a little clarity in a place where there are other things to think about besides her father and the Aurors scouring the countryside for him.

The house is too small for the eight people now living there, and while she’s heard all about Nadine from Tammy before, meeting her is something else entirely. Most of her family practically tiptoes around the two of them; the oldest, Michael, close to their age, seems to be the only exception. The others are quiet, technically friendly to Debbie but reserved. Tammy told her once, before, that it’s like they’re afraid of her, and she couldn’t really fathom that then, but experiencing it in person, it’s more clear.

They are both accustomed to staying up late, and so they wind up sleeping in past breakfast, most days. This is a good strategy to avoid the height of activity in the kitchen from people who don’t seem to want to look either of them in the eye. Debbie learns to recognize the ceiling above the fold-out sofa bed, and just what angle to twist so she can see Tammy. Abby moves quietly about the room when she’s getting ready for work, careful not to wake either of them too early – impressive, considering that the room is significantly more crowded when the sofa bed is pulled out, and she has insisted that Tammy share her bed to give Debbie all the space she could possibly need.

Debbie is decidedly mediocre when it comes to cooking, with magic or without, but Tammy is much better. She makes breakfast and Debbie washes all the dishes and replaces them in the proper cupboards, a habit Tammy has picked up on and instilled upon her, so that Nadine and Oliver never have to clean up after them. After that, they take to spending their days outside of the house, finding the longest stretches they can manage. They go to the beach with the others, who are steadily starting to become less like  _ Debbie’s friends  _ and _ Tammy’s friends  _ and more like  _ their _ friends. They walk through the suburbs, all the houses lined up side by side, and Tammy shows her the house where she grew up. Tammy teaches her how to navigate public transit and they wander into Diagon Alley to find September’s school supplies before the back-to-school rush takes over all the shops. Some days, they visit Danny and Tess’ flat after the work day comes to a close, and it gets  _ easier.  _ To think and talk about other things, to find a casual and carefree way of operating. The days melt into one another and it turns into a better summer than she could have expected.

It scares her a little, though. Or a lot. The ease with which she and Tammy fall in around each other in this new setting, something soft and domestic and simple. The speed with which it makes all of her problems begin to fall away, and the way that makes her feel like a large part of her happiness depends on being close to her, this girl with her smooth golden curls and dark eyes that see everything and sparkle when she smiles.

She doesn’t say it, though. Debbie Ocean is nothing if not an expert at pretending her feelings do not exist.

Tammy takes her to a Muggle thrift store, tells her it’s the one where she found the sweater she gave Debbie for Christmas. Before, she couldn’t have imagined that she might enjoy a place like this so much, but they spend the entire afternoon there, sifting through the contents of the store and returning to the house with a hefty collection of Muggle novels that Debbie has never seen before. Late at night, to quiet her mind when all the thoughts there are alternating from the fact that her dad is still missing to the fact that her girlfriend is so distractingly good at making her forget about the first fact, she reads. Tammy and Abby fall asleep before she does and then she doesn’t want to keep a light on in the bedroom, so she relocates downstairs, sits on the kitchen counter with a glass of water and her book. It’s about magic, and the author has gotten it all wrong.

Michael comes in later and pulls a glass down from the cabinet, too, resting his elbows on the edge of the sink as he fills it with water. He glances at her across the kitchen. “Can’t sleep?” he asks, and she nods. “Hey, so I was thinking… Would you maybe want to get coffee with me or something?”

She freezes for a moment, then collects herself. “Um, I don’t think so,” she says, perhaps a little too bluntly for an otherwise nice enough boy who is the only member of his family to treat Tammy marginally well. She hesitates. “Sorry,” she adds belatedly, but he nods and lets it go.

“It’s okay. I just thought I might ask,” he shrugs. Lowering himself into one of the kitchen chairs, he eyes Debbie curiously. “So you go to school with Tammy?” he inquires. It’s a loaded question, especially in this house, but she nods, anyway. “She said that magic skipped a bunch of generations to get to her. Was it like that for you, too?” He doesn’t miss the look she casts up at the ceiling in the direction of the guest room, where Tammy is sleeping soundly after apparently telling him too much. “She only told me because I kept asking. I’m not going to say a word. I don’t want to get her in… in trouble, or anything.”

Debbie shakes her head, but there’s a tiny smile curving her lips even as she does. “She used to tell her dad everything he wanted to know, too. I think maybe she likes having someone asking again.” And if Tammy has already told him some things, then what’s the harm, really? Nadine’s family is an exception to the law now, had to be flagged as such when Tammy and her mother moved in with them. “It’s not like that for me. My whole family has magic, the whole way back. My mum used to teach at our school, actually.” The automatic inclusion of this fact throws her off, and she hurriedly tacks on, “She… she died last year,” wincing internally at the forwardness of it, but it’s necessary – admissions like that are what keep people from asking more questions about her.

“I’m sorry,” says Michael quietly. He’s been hanging on every limited word, genuine interest shining in his eyes. “That must be very hard.”

“Yeah.” They are both quiet, now. She can see why he and Tammy have always gotten along, the relatively easy silence they can each maintain. There are differences, though. Tammy comes hand-in-hand with open air and wide night skies, a simple way of prompting Debbie to let her in. Michael is unfamiliar territory, the early hours of the morning in a stuffy kitchen and speaking quietly because everyone else is asleep. If he were Tammy, she might talk about her father now. But he’s not, so she just says, “It’s just me and my brother now, I guess,” and lets the not-quite-truthful implications of that statement fill in the gaps.

She isn’t sure what’s more likely – intense awkwardness or more apologies for something that isn’t his fault. What she definitely does not expect is for the next words out of Michael’s mouth to be, “How is he? Your brother?” Catching the flicker of surprise that passes across her face, he at least breaks eye contact long enough to look abashed. “You’re the friend whose brother was in the hospital when Tammy was home for Easter, right? Is he doing okay now?”

Closing her book on her thumb so she can hold her page, Debbie surveys the boy across from her. “You’ve got a good memory,” she remarks. “He’s okay now. He’s like your… police, so it’s sort of dangerous. But magic has this way of being really good at healing.” At first glance, this feels like a good subject change, something to steer the conversation steadily away from talking about her father, but all it does is bring the thought of him to the forefront of her mind. What if one of the hexes that Danny got caught in the crossfire came from their father’s wand? She pictures him sitting at Danny’s bedside before he had to go into the office, the day Tammy came to visit at St Mungo’s, and feels something sinking in the pit of her stomach. Could he do something like that? Could he hurt Danny and then be there while he healed, and not feel an overwhelming, crushing sense of guilt?

— • —

Abby insists on being the one to drive Debbie back home to get more of her things. “I might not know anything about magic, but I’m still the adult here,” she says stubbornly, and Tammy shuts her mouth firmly instead of arguing with her.

They make it through the gate at the end of the driveway without a fuss this time, and Tammy’s mother stays downstairs, peppering the Aurors still occupying the space with questions she probably won’t fully understand the answers to. Debbie moves fast to collect her things, shoving everything she possibly can into her trunk. Later, she’ll pack them more concisely, press them all tight together to make more space for the textbooks she bought in Diagon Alley. “Nadine’s going to lose her mind when we get this back to the house,” Tammy murmurs, pulling sweaters from Debbie’s closet and handing them over one by one. “You should have seen her face the first time she saw my broom. Maybe we should have done this tomorrow, so she’d be at church.”

On the way back, Abby takes a detour. Debbie is not paying enough attention to realize this on her own, but Tammy straightens up next to her, frowning. “Mum? Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” is the rather mysterious answer she’s given.

It turns out to be an apartment building. Pulling up at the curb in front of it, Abby turns the car off and twists in her seat to face them. They’ve opted for the back seat, which she’s been joking about every time she drives them anywhere (“It makes me feel like a chauffeur!”), and Debbie’s pretty sure she knows where this is going, but Tammy just stares back in a wary sort of confusion.

“I didn’t want to say anything until I knew if it would work out,” says Tammy’s mum, and she even looks a little bit apprehensive. Despite the obvious mother-daughter power imbalance, it’s evident that the Prescotts treat each other as equals wherever possible. Debbie is certain that her own parents would never convey the same concern when it came to spilling secrets to her. Even when they sat her down to tell her that her mother was sick, it was a truth that came forward readily, clear and confident, like it wasn’t a wrecking ball. “But I… I got us an apartment. It’s small and I know you would have wanted a balcony and it doesn’t have one, and we have to do laundry in the basement with those machines you put coins in, but it’s got two bedrooms and it’s close to my work, so I thought…” She trails off here, and Debbie turns her head  _ just slightly _ to see what Tammy’s face looks like. It’s twisted in the sort of surprise that tells her she’s waiting for someone to tell her this isn’t real, like she’s trying not to get her hopes up. Her mother reaches out to tap her knee softly. “Tammy, honey. Do you want to see it?”

She’s right; the place is small, and the two bedrooms are a little cramped. Technically, they could climb out the window to sit on the fire escape and it could pass for a sort of balcony, even if it’s against the rules. The walls are in dire need of a better colour, and Abby promises their next stop is to look at paint chips and find some options. She officially got the keys yesterday, and the place is officially hers.  _ Theirs _ – hers and Tammy’s. Debbie watches her girlfriend take it all in, moving slow around the flat until she’s seen everything, and then Tammy crosses back to her mother and hugs her tightly.

“I like it,” she says in a fierce sort of whisper, and Debbie pretends not to hear her. This is a moment that’s not meant for her at all.

They leave Debbie’s trunk there, Abby triple-checking the door has been locked behind them, and go to a Muggle hardware store, where they pull paint chips from a wall full of colour. Debbie has never been to a store like this, never selected new paint colours. It’s never been necessary, when a well-cast charm will change the colour of the pre-existing paint easily enough. She trails her fingers over every shade she can reach while Tammy and her mum narrow their options down to two, and they ask her to be the tie-breaker. She picks Tammy’s colour, and Abby rolls her eyes and mumbles something along the lines of, “Well, of course,” but she’s smiling brightly when she hands the final selection over to the man helping them.

They go for a walk late at night through the suburbs, hands held loosely to keep them from drifting too far apart. Debbie wears the sweater Tammy gave her for Christmas, and Tammy’s got one of her dad’s hoodies on. The sleeves of both are just a little too long. “I kind of thought maybe we’d be stuck with Nadine forever,” Tammy admits, casting a glance over her shoulder, back in the direction of the house. There are cans of paint and rollers and brushes in the back of Abby’s car, waiting for tomorrow. “My mum hasn’t really talked to me about money since we started staying here. I guess she wanted to make sure she could get a place before she told me.”

Sunday is spent painting. Debbie has good attention to detail, and even if she’s unfamiliar with some parts of the process, it’s easy to get the hang of. On Monday, after Abby finishes work, they methodically load boxes that have been stored in Nadine’s garage into Abby’s car, and stay at the new flat until after sunset to unpack. Michael comes on Tuesday to help them assemble furniture. The place is small enough that the entire move doesn’t take long, but they take their time, putting a great deal of care into making it perfect. They’re aiming for the official move to happen over the weekend, leaving them with one week there before the Hogwarts Express will transport Debbie and Tammy back to school.

Tammy has grown considerably brighter since her mother dropped the news about the apartment. This is saying something, considering that she’s typically good at remaining positive – but it’s different, Debbie thinks, when her insides are getting lighter and happier, too. She takes Debbie to a Muggle movie theatre on Friday, the night before the move, and is amused by the whole thing because Debbie’s never been to one before. She tries to make the whole experience as perfect as possible, even pays extra for butter on the popcorn. When they step into the theatre, she hesitates. “Where do you want to sit?”

Of course, Debbie has no idea. She calls the shots on a lot of things, but this isn’t one of them. She surveys the rows of fabric-covered chairs before them and bites down on the inside of her cheek thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Where are the best seats?”

“The middle, maybe? Or sometimes people sit at the very back,” answers Tammy, gesturing upward with the paper bag full of popcorn. “So they can make out if the movie’s boring.”

Debbie smiles. “Okay. The very back it is, then.” She lets Tammy lead the way up the stairs to the last row, sits down next to her, and then looks at her mischievously. “So when do we make out? Is it soon?”

Nudging her with her elbow, Tammy points to the screen with her drink. “You have to pay attention to the movie,” she says stubbornly. Setting her drink in the cupholder, she reaches for Debbie’s hand and intertwines their fingers together. But halfway through the film, she leans over to bring her mouth close to Debbie’s ear. “Debbie. Deb. This movie’s kinda boring.” 

Debbie tries to look at her very seriously, but her eyes betray her, flickering down to Tammy’s lips briefly. “Hmm. Whatever should we do about that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END OF THIS CHAPTER... I'M SO SOFT, Y'ALL.
> 
> full disclosure, guys, i have absolutely no idea when the next chapter is going to drop. i've been trying to keep to this weekly schedule since midway through the first fic, but my mental health (and, therefore, my muse) has taken a bit of a hit lately, and the next chapter... isn't done. i'm feeling all kinds of stressed out about it because every other time i've posted, i've had a solid head start, so i think i want to try and write a couple chapters before i get the next one posted. hopefully it won't be too long!
> 
> in the meantime, though, i've got some exciting halloween-y things coming up! just a few one-shots and things that i got prompts for at the beginning of the month. and some of them are debtam, and one even falls in this universe. so keep your eyes open for those, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled program as soon as possible!
> 
> if you've got a moment to drop kudos or a comment, or head over to twitter and follow me @deboceans OR my new account @backsiidings where i mostly just ramble about writing things, it would make me so happy! thank you, as always, for reading! until next time, guys. ♥


End file.
